Wednesday Writerly Words: The Power of Crap!
Ever tune into the Syfy channel on a weekend night and see something like Megapiranha, or Giant Shark vs Mega Octopus? These are the productions of a company called The Asylum, perhaps best known for creating “mockbusters,” low budget quick turnaround movies meant to hone in on a blockbuster release. Things like The Transmorphers, or Snakes on a Plane, or even when the titles are public domain things like Sherlock Holmes (but this one had dinosaurs). They’re quickly becoming one of my favorite movie sources, because they are consistently bad, and they’re consistently awesome in that badness.
Anyone who has watched on of these movies can’t help but think “I could do that.”
So this past weekend…I did. With the assistance and prodding of my wife, we sat down and plotted an Asylum caliber movie called Trilobite Terror, then over the course of about 28 hours, I completely wrote the first draft. It’s a little under length, has a few plot points that need cleaning up, but it’s nothing that a few more monster attacks can’t take care of.
There was something empowering about the process, not worrying about whether any of the science makes sense (of COURSE trilobites would suddenly get bigger when brought into a lower pressure environment) or character development (of COURSE the two main characters are madly in love at the end in spite of knowing each other for 72 hours). It’s not the way every writing project should be approached, but I think a few helpful things come out of the exercise:
- Never underestimate the cleansing power of completing a project, no matter how dubiously entered.
- It’s great practice on writing screenplay format.
- Its’ great practice at being a contract screen writer.
And that third one is the big one. There are people who do this for a living, are given a concept or a struggling script and a weekend to produce something. We went into plotting with a mock packet of information from the film producer: the film title, and who has already been cast as the lead roles. From there, it was just an exercise in having some fun with corny dialogue, crappy science, and just having a lot of fun writing. Great way to dust off the cobwebs and get out of any doldrums you might be in. I’d recommend the exercise to anyone who enjoys bad movies and fun writing.
DL Thurston can be found at http://DLThurston.com/blog Rust is available now for Kindle and ePub readers, coming soon to Sony Reader and iPad.
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